growfs questions

UNIX Solaris
1

I have a pretty old Sun box (Ultra2 to be specific) with an A1000 storage attached. It's running Solaris 2.6 and has DiskSuite 4.2 installed. There's a filesystem that's almost out of disk space, and I have a free LUN on the A1000 that I can use to expand it by creating a concatenation. I've never done this before, but the procedure in DiskSuite manual seems straight-forward. However, I have a couple of questions:

  1. Will this work on Solaris 2.6 with DiskSuite 4.2? Especially the growfs part? Is there anything I should watch out for, considering I have such old software versions?

  2. How long time the growfs might take? I'm expanding 72 GB partition to double the size.

  3. What are my chances of failure/losing data? Just trying to get an idea. I do have a backup.

Any other suggestions/recommendations will be very helpful! Thanks in advance!

2

  1. Why wouldn't it work (growfs)? Just make sure the space isn't already used (raw devices being used by a Oracle/Sybase/other product) - as long as the space isn't used by something else, you shouldn't have any issues otherwise.

  2. No clue (that was helpful, wasn't it). I think it's the same amount of time it takes to newfs a new 72GB filesystem (again, really helpful info here)

  3. Very doubtful you would lose anything - growfs automatically locks the filesystem so no writes can happen while it working. From the 4.2 docs:

3

Thanks - already checked, it doesn't seem that we're using any database s/w on that box that would use a raw disk partition.

I'm just being a bit uncomfortable since everything on that box is such an old version, even the DiskSuite is ancient... hopefully it will work :wink: